When you can’t solve a problem, change the terms of reference so that you can.

President Obama in a newly released document has redefined national security policy in terms of domestic policy. Blaming the Bush administration for relying on “military might”, Obama declared that what was important was the home front. David Martin of CBS News writes “if you had to pick one sentence in this 52 page document which defines President Obama’s National Security Strategy it would be this: “the foundation of American leadership must be a prosperous economy.” By implication President Obama is going to give America that prosperous economy in order to defend it. But can he do it?

If the Massachusetts is any indicator, the path back to a robust economy may depart from the President’s world view. The Bay State Senate [see correction suggested in comments below] recently passed a bill cracking down on illegal immigrants. Boston.com reports:

With one lawmaker citing President Lincoln’s respect for the rule of law, the Massachusetts Senate passed a far-reaching crackdown this afternoon on illegal immigrants and those who would hire them, going further, senators said, than any immigration bill proposed over the past five years. …

The measure, which passed on a 28-10 vote as an amendment to the budget, would bar the state from doing business with any company found to break federal laws barring illegal immigrant hiring. It would also toughen penalties for creating or using fake identification documents, and explicitly deny in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants.

The amendment would also require the state’s public health insurance program to verify residency through the Department of Homeland Security, and would require the state to give legal residents priority for subsidized housing.

It was an extraordinary action for the Bluest of Blue States and reflected the pressure on the American job market, which is unabated. A proposal “to extend jobless benefits for people who have been out of work for more than six months” ran into trouble with conservative Democrats as legislators found that deficit spending was the only alternative to continuing even politically important programs. “Thousands of people are set to begin losing jobless benefits when an extension of unemployment insurance expires next week. A 65 percent subsidy for health insurance benefits for the unemployed under the COBRA program also expires.” But the fear that borrowing had gone too far was enough to give even Democratic legislators pause.

The expanded jobless benefits provide up to 99 weeks of payments in many states, at a cost of nearly $40 billion. The benefits are part of a bill that includes a one-year extension of about 50 popular tax breaks that expired at the end of last year and a delay in scheduled cuts in Medicare payments to doctors.

The cost of the bill would be partially offset by tax increases on investment fund managers, oil companies and some international businesses. The tax increases total about $57 billion over the next decade. Changes giving underfunded pensions more time to improve their finances would raise $2 billion.

The original package unveiled last week would have extended unemployment benefits through December and delayed a 21 percent cut in Medicare payments until 2014. The pared-down bill would delay the Medicare cuts until 2012, when lawmakers would have to address the issue again.

The troubles of the jobless benefits bill are indicator of how serious the potential economic challenges are. Not only do they threaten the livelihoods of millions, they threaten political careers. And that must, on no account, be allowed to happen. One interpretation of the President’s new National Security Strategy is to signal that he will sacrifice military might abroad to keep back irate voters at home. The North Koreans may have nukes, but the North Koreans don’t vote. At least not yet. The belated realization of the seriousness of the situation may be behind the President’s decision to not not endorse the boycott of Arizona for its new immigration law. “I’m the president of the United States, I don’t endorse boycotts or not endorse boycotts,” he replied when asked about it. Caught at the fork in the road between his liberal constituency and the public mood, Obama decided to take both roads.

In a CBS News poll released Tuesday, 52 percent of Americans said the Arizona law was “about right” in its approach to illegal immigration.

The desire to remake America along the lines of a European-style welfare state is running into the hardest of all possible obstacles: the lack of money. Obama’s new national security stance sends the message that all available resources are going to be shifted to saving his domestic agenda or at least keeping the domestic economic troubles from spinning out of control. That will be problematic because cutting costs must run counter to the concept that government is a solution to ‘problems’. Cap and trade, immigration reform, a vast expansion of health entitlements by definition now become national security issues. At the very least they become political job security issues. Any sufficiently effective effort to create a prosperous economy will require Obama to liquidate his ‘solution’s. But they are the point of his presidency, the goal of his legion of spoils-seekers. The President is in the impossible position of standing in his own way.

122 Comments, 122 Threads

What’s annoying about T Boone Pickens idea about converting short haul trucks and busses to natural gas. Is that it will work. that it it will a.) collapse US demand for foreign oil. b.)it will collapse world wide oil prices. c.)It will take the pressure off the dollar and rather enrich the world by hardening the dollar held in foreign banks.d.) defund american enemies.

Its the e that I’m not so fond of
e.)shifting to natural gas will enable the american government status quo to continue.

Obama has the inherent mendacity to ‘pull a Clinton,’ but for the fact that he’s such an ideologue.

It’s ironic that, very superficially, his apparent new prescription for ‘national security’ sounds very much like what a Ron or Rand Paul might prescribe: a focus on American prosperity while deemphasizing international committments. I don’t believe Obama for a minute.

The question is can Obama’s magical thinking of ‘Extend and Pretend” “prosperity” extend past the elections of 2010? or even 2012?

Market indicators are saying a big fat NO.

The M3 money supply dipped nearly 10% in april alone- something it has never done. And the leading economic indicators have been falling sharply since last fall. People filing for unemployment is up. The phony Census hiring gambit will be gone soon. Gone already are Cash for Clunkers, and the new Homebuyer credits. The Greek contagion is spreading . And with the stock market starting to dump, I think a good bet is that the Obama/Bernacke fantasy of economic recovery will not make it to the fall before the double dip starts. It’s looks like a hard dose of reality is about to slap around our Traitor in Chief.

Obama is more interested in waging war against the US economy than he is in standing up for our interests abroad. The man has his priorities.

In all honesty it doesn’t matter one whit who controls the Korean Peninsula or whether Iran gets nukes. If Obama’s agenda is not stopped here at home then we will not have a country worth defending. Socialism can ravage a country to a degree that no weapon yet devised by man can match.

Everyone else will just have to fend for themselves while we conduct our civil war at home. It is just as well because the Ignoramus in Chief can’t even be counted on to fight on the right side as we saw just last year in South America where he backed the attempted coup in Honduras.

Nothing new to this idea, it being well established over the last 2000 years of warfare. Pre 21st century, the side with the biggest battalions won most of the time. Bigger battalions cost more.
It is the reason why the USA has Stealth aircraft and combat robots (battle droids). I am surprised that the LLMD has figured it out. Next thing you know he will figure out that there are other nations and peoples that hate America as much as he does. Boy, will that be a surprise to him.

So will he put our money where his mouth is and restore the F-22 to the defense budget? Don’t hold your breath.

Incredibly, back when Davis was scrambling to save his office, every manner of pension boon was permitted.

What happened at the State level was then used by union negotiators to bump up their pension compensation, too.

Hence the over night riches of the Dot Com mania became folded into government pensions far and wide. Expectations that 8% risk-free returns, per year, after all expenses under-pinned the calculus!

Instead, the ‘Summers Effect’ kicked in: massive losses in all markets by the pension ‘managers’ must be made up by the taxpayers and then topped off with additional funds to cover the lack of profits in the funds.

On top of that — such investment pools are hugely exposed to Syn-CDOs. When you consider the adverse selections stuffed into these frauds — the taxpayers are going to be hit yet again when the market realizes that these ‘assets’ are time bombs.

It’s the chasmic asset collapses within the school pension scheme that is causing these rocketing budget gaps.

Pensions need to be re-set, retirements must be delayed. No other route provides a cure.

Whatever schadenfreude one might be tempted to feel should be weighed against the real dangers coming on fast. The dangers that were supposed to be held off by the stimulus, cash for clunkers and green shoots, and green jobs, and America’s new moral standing in the world. The perils that were supposed to have been banished by the address to Muslim world in Cairo university, the moment the seas began to fall, grand bargains, wars only of necessity, health care “reform”, teaching moments, engagement, strategic patience and now, a new national security model. All those menaces, both real and imagined, are coming on fast.

“We have a President!” Andrew Sullivan declared in response to BHO’s reluctance to meet McChrystal for months. But maybe it was only the sound of a man playing President that he heard; not a President really. And if Sullivan is wrong, is that grounds to rejoice? Heck no. It’s grounds to start worrying. Because that means that no one is at the wheel. Just a guy who makes one speech after the other. Soaring rhetoric, great phrases, moving cadences and the dawning realization this is one big stall. It’s an ‘uh’ and ‘er’ and ‘hmm’ while he tries to figure out what the buttons on the control panel do anyway? The Great Oz commands you … the Great Oz commands you …

Who is in charge of the clattering train?
The axles creak, and the couplings strain.
Ten minutes behind at the Junction. Yes!
And we’re twenty now to the bad–no less!
We must make it up on our flight to town.
Clatter and crash! ‘That’s the last train down,
Flashing by with a steamy trail.
Pile on the fuel! We must not fail.
At every mile we a minute must gain!

Who is in charge of the clattering train?

Only a man, but away at his back,
In a dozen cars, on the steely track,
A hundred passengers place their trust
In this fellow of fustian, grease and dust.
They cheerily chat, or they calmly sleep,
Sure that the driver his watch will keep
On the night-dark track, that he will not fail.

So the thud, thud, thud of wheel on rail
The hiss of steam-spurts athwart the dark,
Lull them to confident drowsiness. Hark!
What is that sound? ‘Tis the stertorous breath
Of a slumbering man, – and it smacks of death!
Full sixteen hours of continuous toil
Midst the fume of sulphur, the reek of oil,
Have told their tale on the tired man’s brain,
And Death is in charge of the clattering train!

A hundred hearts beat placidly on,
Unwitting they that their warder’s gone;
A hundred lips are babbling blithe,
Some seconds hence they in pain may writhe.
For the pace is hot, and the points are near,
And Sleep hath deadened the driver’s ear;
And signals flash through the night in vain.

After the last severe recession in the early 1980s, GDP grew at rates of 7 to 9 percent for five straight quarters and the unemployment rate dropped from 10.8 to 7.2 percent in 18 months.

That’s from an AP story on the downward revision of first quarter growth estimate to a 3 percent annual rate. Even the AP says the growth rate will have to double to bring down unemployment significantly.

Economists say it takes about 3 percent growth to create enough jobs just to keep up with the population increase. Growth would have to be about 5 percent for a full year just to drive the unemployment rate down 1 percentage point.

What did that idiot Ronald Reagan do differently from President Obama — I mean besides pretty much everything?

For some time now I have thought that the Left’s newfound interest in a hydrogen economy, hybrid and electric cars, and even relenting on their opposition to nuclear power to some degree was all based on a grim realization on their part:

“It’s clear that we don’t do International stuff worth a crap, so let’s not do any more of it than we can get away with.”

If you are concerned about energy you have to be concerned about international relations. So let’s figure out a way to decouple those two. Not because you want to make the USA’s economy impervious to the situation in the ME but because you want to be able to ignore the ME.

Obama’s “Well, you’ve got me now” approach to international relations has fallen on its face every time so it is time not to do any more international stuff but instead suggest that multi-lateral boards, commissions, and study groups be created to study things and thus create the illusion of useful activity.

Bill Clinton inherited the best international situation in the history of the USA and in response vowed to “focus like a laser beam on the economy.” He was going to have a very hard time outshining Reagan and Bush so it was no longer important. And then after ignoring the War On Terror he pined away about not having any really good international challenges to enable him to shine. The claim that the Clinton’s brilliant strategy kept the Norks form having 100 nukes and let then have only a half dozen or so ignores the fact that in 1994 the we could have nuked North Korea into a large scale simulation of the Moon and nobody but maybe Castro would have said squat about it.

By the way, a recent article in National Review points out that Prince William County in Virginia enacted a law in 2007 that is for all intents and purposes identical to that passed in Arizona. And despite dire warnings of horrific consequences it has worked just fine.

What do Indian tribes do when they get a Casino? Kick out as many as they can from the tribe so the money goes further. We are all now in the reverse Indian Tribe with a Casino. Still have money, no windfall, we have to kick people out to make the money go further.

Wretchard: CORRECTION — the MA Senate voted for the bill. It must still pass the MA House and be signed by Gov. Deval Patrick (good luck with either). Politically, even Patrick can sustain a veto.

Moreover, one might ask as a politician, why Dems allowed money to go for illegal aliens to get free public housing (Obama’s Auntie Zeituma or whatever her name is), health benefits, and in-state tuition. Not to mention free K-12 education.

Yes, ask and shift blame. Not the least because it works.

HDGREENE — Reagan cut taxes and regulations, but critically also spent a lot of money on military stuff, which immediately soaked up unemployment, and gave him a big stick to whack enemies with, or threaten. Obama canceled the F-22 Raptor program and threw 130K out of work.

Obama’s play is easy and simple to spot. Protect government unions at all costs. Since Blacks are vastly over-represented in Government employment (which is your reason right there why a bad bureaucracy is even worse, as any visit to your local DMV will prove), use the racial bloody shirt to get masses of Blacks and Hispanics parading around, threatening, and hopefully touch off an urban riot or two targeting Whites and Asians, so they know their place.

Chicago politics. All he knows. Get the Union goons out. Beat up some Whites. Threaten more. Cry racism. Polarize everything into “poor, oppressed Blacks and Hispanics” vs. “ugly, rich racist Whites.” Taken from the knee of his big hero Harold Washington. Anything to keep the money coming in for his groups at the expense of others.

White voters have to choose — knuckle under with threats of violence and being called “racist” or act like Indian tribe members, vote others out. Or Survivor, if you prefer. Voting folks off the Island.

Just kicking out 30 million illegals (and their kids) would take a huge burden off spending and allow things like libraries (which only middle class White people care about) to stay open by ending welfare for out of work construction workers from Jalisco with seven kids, and the mother of said kids with a fourth grade Mexican education. None of them literate in any language. Those folks are merely a permanent import of poverty and social spending at a time of great crisis.

Laws can and will be broken widely and deeply when they are unpopular. Prohibition never stopped drinking, and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were noted drug users (the latter admitting cocaine, in addition to marijuana).

hdgreene @ 15: What did that idiot Ronald Reagan do differently from President Obama — I mean besides pretty much everything?

Let me count the ways.

1. The US still had a manufacturing economy.
2. He reduced exorbitant taxes.
3. He had Volkert rather than Greenspan.
4. Computers were a rising force and benefit to the economy.
5. After facing down Iran, our further interaction with dar al-Islam was minimal – although the Beirut Marine barracks were a foretaste of things to come. We backed Iraq, and the Afghan mujihadeen, as a matter of fact.

I’m getting a modernized visual of Edwin J Milliken’s poem. It’s of a jammed-to-the-gills tour bus heading downhill from Yosemite National Park with an entertaining and glib tour director on the microphone, describing the passing wonders, but no one in the driver’s seat. And a steep drop-off to the river looming large. Most of us are doomed.

One of our companies is a specialty contractor that builds concrete structures (formwork, rebar, concrete, etc.). It recently started a new, relatively large project.

It has had some difficulty finding labor. The wage rate on offer was a little over $13 per hour for a semi-skilled, rough carpenter position. It’s hard work, but this project will run for about 6 months, so it would be a good gig, and there would be steady work – “four tens” as we call in in the construction business: 40 hours in 4 days, then 3 days off.

Anyway, we had a number of folks come by the site to inquire about the job but turned us down flat. Why? They were on unemployment insurance, and they had several weeks left.

Unemployment pays them about $350 per week. (The first $2,400 dollars is not subject to income tax, so the effective rate is actually higher for relatively recent unemployeds.) This means that they are paid about $8 per hour for doing nothing.

Put differently, working for us is worth only $5 per hour to them at the margin. Who would want to do a tough job for only $5 per hour? They’re actually being economically rational by turning us down. In addition, there are plenty of folks who will hire these guys for $8-10 per hour and pay cash, so they can earn $16-18 per hour outside of the system (more, of course, when you tax effect it – $10 is probably worth about $15 pre-tax).

So, given the choice between working for $13 per hour, not working for $8 per hour, or working for $16 per hour, what you would do?

By extending unemployment benefits, we provide incentives for people to work outside of the system, or not work at all. This is destructive of the work ethic of our nation, and increases the load on those who do choose to work.

But I’m sure that progressives feel better when they pass a benefits extension.

In fairness, President Obama is entirely a product of the political system and the gatekeeping system that thrust him forward. Even if he was never elected someone like him would have been. The ethnicity is immaterial. The ‘coolness’ is however, essential, where ‘coolness’ is that particular confluence of dysfunction, abstraction and indifference that marks the thoroughly attractive modern man. The man with the permanent sneer, snappy comeback, and ‘courage’ not to care, but really care, though he will only show it five minutes before the credits roll. A thoroughly fantastic creature. And the thing about Barack Obama is that he is the man in the social mirror, the perfect representation of our highest PC social values. When people turn on him politically, it will not be for anything he lacks, but rather because they remind them of what they wanted to be like. Like stepping out in seventies threads, with the muttonchop sideburns and the psychedelic shirt, it is too embarassing to admit that this … this … was what I thought the ideal should me. Something like myself. He just played the part. And maybe society deserved him too.

Mark Steyn, reflecting on Western folly says that by rights, we’re too broke to be this stupid, funding one crapola program after the other. After enumerating ever misbegotten program he can think of, Steyn writes:

By the way, where does the government get the money to fund all these immensely useful programs?
According to a Fox News poll earlier this year, 65 per cent of Americans understand that the government gets its money from taxpayers, but 24 per cent think the government has “plenty of its own money without using taxpayer dollars.” You can hardly blame them for getting that impression in an age in which there is almost nothing the state won’t pay for. I confess I warmed to that much-mocked mayor in Doncaster, England, who announced a year or two back that he wanted to stop funding for the Gay Pride parade on the grounds that, if they’re so damn proud of it, why can’t they pay for it? He was actually making a rather profound point, but, as I recall, he was soon forced to back down. In Canada, almost every ethnocultural booster group is on the public teat. Outside Palestine House in Toronto the other week, the young Muslim men were caught on tape making explicitly eliminationist threats about Jews, but c’mon, everything else in Canada is taxpayer-funded, why not genocidal incitement? We’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid.

But what happens when the money runs out, the check kiting no longer works? When you’re hunkered in an inner room with the blinds drawn and pretend to ignore the repo men knocking urgently at the door? When you tilt the bottle into your mouth and nothing comes out? Do you stop being stupid then? Hell no. Stupidity requires medicine besides poverty. If hardship and penury cured stupidity it would have long been eliminated from the face of the earth. No. Your minds churns and you think of one more grift, one more racket, one more line of bunk to peddle. Like Brecht said, in Atlantis, even when the waves rushed in, people were still looking for their make-up.

Here is a little item I got in the e-mail today, especially for Leo and the rest of the Belmont Texas contingent:

TEXAS INGENUITY ——— Gotta Love Those Texans…

I have a friend who is president of his homeowners association in the Dallas, Texas suburbs. They were having a terrible problem with litter near some of his association’s homes. The reason according to Wallace (my friend) is that six very large, luxurious new houses are being built right next to their community.

The trash was coming from the foreign laborers working at the construction sites and included bags from McDonald’s, Burger King and 7-11, plus coffee cups, napkins, cigarette butts, soda cans, empty bottles, etc. He went to see the site supervisor and even the general contractor politely urging them to get their workers not to litter the neighborhood, to no avail. He called the city, county, and police and got no help there either.

So here is what his community did. They organized about twenty folks, named themselves The “Inner Neighborhood Services” group, and arranged to go out at lunchtime and “police” the trash themselves. It is what they did while picking up the trash that is so hilarious.

They bought navy blue baseball caps and had the initials”INS” embroidered in gold on the caps. It does not take a rocket scientist to understand what they hoped people might mistakenly think the letters really stand for. After the Inner Neighborhood Services group’s first lunch time pickup detail, with all of them wearing their caps and some carrying cameras, 46 out of the total of 68 construction workers did not show up for work the next morning — and haven’t come back yet. It has been ten days now.

The General Contractor, I am told is furious, but cannot say anything publicly because he could be busted for hiring illegals…

Wallace and his bunch cannot be accused of impersonating federal personnel, because they have the official name of the group recorded in their homeowner association minutes along with a notation about the vote to approve formation of the new subcommittee!

This too shall pass. Nothing in the economy that can’t be fixed by eliminating the Income tax, going to a balanced budget and eliminating or restricting welfare.. Your payroll guys will have a 30% pay increase, which they will spend while they have it. Or their wives and children will take care of that little chore. That will increase demand by about 30%. So the rich people will have to build more factories to produce those widgets. Since they will have more money they won’t have to borrow as much. What they do borrow will be under better terms. Supply and demand.
Those widget factories need employees. They will have money to spend now also. Those widgets will have to get to market and be sold, so more trucks will be needed. That means more truckers and more trucks. That means more factories to build the new trucks.
There will be a need for clerks to take orders for widgets. More jobs. Since switching to a VAT done in arrears will lower the tax base until all this demand has time to work, welfare will be reduced, giving the unemployed incentive to take one of those new jobs.
No, getting out of this recession is just as simple as moving wealth from the government back into the private sector, where it creates more wealth. Creating wealth is something no government has ever done. Not sure why anyone rational expects a government to create wealth. I mean if a person is interested in creating wealth, they avoid working for the government. You cannot have wealth without people wanting to create wealth.

25. Rosinante
Theoretically, you are correct. Problem is when new jobs for widgets go off-shore – then no new hires – not even for high-tech. Unless there is a free market for all countries, there cannot be a true free market here. There are fewer and fewer entry level jobs available.

Richard Fernandez wrote “One interpretation of the President’s new National Security Strategy is to signal that he will sacrifice military might abroad to keep back irate voters at home.”

Irate leftie voters, that is. The dependent class. Those whose livelihoods depend on the government.

But it might not work. Many Americans have decided enough with the old way of business, that government “benefits” are not worth having. The Tea Party movement epitomizes this thinking

Which side has the greater numbers will be determined this November and in 2012.

Even so, sacrificing military strength for domestic spending is risky. If Obama loses a war, or even if we lose a few major surface combatants before whacking the enemy, Obama could well find himself impeached. Recall that JFK thought he’d be impeached if he didn’t get those missiles out of Cuba.

The ‘coolness’ is however, essential, where ‘coolness’ is that particular confluence of dysfunction, abstraction and indifference that marks the thoroughly attractive modern man.

Wretchard,

I actually got to talk to Rush Limbaugh a couple of years ago — during the Democratic primaries. Normally I listen to him when I’m in the car but this day I was home when I had him on. He was trying to explain why Senator Obama was getting a pass on his many dicey associations. He said, “People say this election is about the future and that is all in the past.” I thought I could nuance what he was saying and called in — and was quite amazed when the phone was answered.

What I said was that supporting Senator Obama was people’s “ticket into the cool.” They thought Obama was cool, that his upbringing was cool, that that book he wrote was cool and the fact that he knew people like Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers was cool — not so much that he would agree with them, but that his circle would intersect their circle.

In any case, I ended up getting in an argument with Rush, him saying it was about the future and me saying it was about the cool. I rather thought I won. Later he summed up my arguments — and actually improved them. He said, “What did that Guy say? But Rush! But Rush! It’s cool that he knows those Radicals! It’s cool that he went to Harvard but also went to that church. It’s cool…” Then closed with, “maybe it will help win the nomination, but it won’t help him win in November.”

Hearing that I said, “Hey, Mable, Rush just called me a guy.” And not just any guy — but that guy.

Turns out I was right about the power of the cool — although the staying power of the cool is not looking so, well, cool.

Here’s Peggy Noonan, a former supporter whose head has recently emerged from her butt:

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center.

It is not his job to be in sync with the center. It is the job of the center to be in sync with him. Lately, they have not been doing their job. Soon, we will need a new center!

Rosinante @ 25: “Nothing in the economy that can’t be fixed by eliminating the Income tax”

That won’t do anything for the unemployed. And as f47 points out, those who do have incomes will have to spend the extra money on imports.

There was a fascinating article recently about an MIT professor who has developed new battery technology – something that might make “green” technology a bit less economically infeasible. His company is building a factory in the US — takes 27 months. They are also building a factory in China — up & running in 9 months. And the Feds have the gall to complain about how long it takes British Petroleum to control a blowout in the Gulf of Mexico!

Taxation is an obstacle to progress. But regulation has become an insuperable barrier. The US has lots of regulation, a devastated industrial base, high unemployment, and an unsustainable trade deficit. Think there might be some linkage there?

Excessive regulation has to be rolled back. In a world where politicians can’t afford to cut taxes, it may be their only choice — as well as being the right thing to do.

The faux ethnicity is the most offensive one possible in all of American history, voters get their raux off showing how open-minded they are that they can overlook it, the candidate his own self depends on just that perversity, calls his opponent a pig with lipstick, and the establishment laughs and claps their hands in glee. Sure, the ethnicity does not matter, just the role it plays. If this guy really wanted to be president, but his name was Barry Smith, would he have ever gotten national attention? This is such a big, violent offense to decency from day one, nothing that follows – nothing – can ever be a real surprise, art that is not quite crime, crime that is not quite art.

As usual wretchard‘s thread title means something. Keep your eye on the moving pea and the rotating shells. One of three things will happen;
1. you will prove to be a rube who naturally fixates on the game,
2. you will reject the game and attempt to sweep the shells and pea away,
3. you will realize the true nature of the pea and gain control over the game.

Obama destroys the economy to make America safe for the world. He then claims that he will focus on the economy because a poor America creates international instability. In Obamaland America’s greed generated wealth creates world poverty and oppression and American regulated and deindustrialized poverty also creates world poverty and oppression. He will flog the horse until wolves have carried off its last bones. Even then he will look for some collection of inbred bitter clingers to send the environmental impact bill to for the cost of one dead horse.

Awesome dudeness can get a man elected, but it won’t clean up an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Chicago Smooth can raise hopes, but it won’t save Louisiana’s wetlands. Winning first prize in the freak show of twenty-first century cigar store Indians doesn’t get you taken seriously by foreign despots. A man can be cool, he can be smooth, he can be exotic, and he can be hip, but that doesn’t mean he is respected.

‘Twas a man who rode a wave to power
The Nobel prize committee called him man of the hour
Now the wave brings in crude oil and sludge
And the smell of fumes no words can fudge

He came into power as Chicago cool
And bowed to despots like an old court fool
Yet his Muslim family tree won’t gain him respect
If he acts like a clown, what can he expect?

Now here is a man who campaigned on Hope,
Yet now he just finds it so hard to cope
He had all the answers in his famous address
Yet that spill in the Gulf is one great big mess

Be careful what you ask for lest you get it
Adversity is rough if you haven’t met it
The Presidency is all too easy to get
When you’re a privileged ass who’s a teacher’s pet

The moral of the story I hope is clear
Be really careful when power is near
It is one thing to go and say yes we can
Yet another to fix things when they hit the fan

The Rolling Stones’ 1972 classic Exile On Main St. re-enters The Billboard 200 at #2, just behind the latest Glee album, which debuts at #1. The last time Exile was in the top 10 (Aug. 19, 1972), Richard Nixon was President, the Carpenters were on top and Maude was a month away from its debut on CBS.

This album wasn’t a favorite of mine. Here’s the lyrics & titles. Anyone can plug the names into google to pull up their favorite.

Yes, it’s perfect timing for the reemergence. Particularly so in that one of the long-rumored but unreleased cuts from the album has finally found its way into the light. That previously unreleased cut’s title and lyrics could not be bettered for explaining Obama.

You don’t like Exile on Main Street? That’s the raucous, raw, still young but getting a clue, Stones at their best. But yeah, the Stones were so good in other ways and albums. But, man, Exile on Main Street rocks! Only Gramm Parsons marred the effort if you ask me!

Oh, and also, go Carpenters!

But, screw Maude.

But, the reason I weigh in on this thread is to express my utter disgust over the video of the teachers of Orange County as presented by Wretchard above in the thread masthead.

Good God, something about “public” programs have always made my skin crawl everytime I encountered them. I think that if public school systems actually delivered on half of their promises I’d be a gung-ho supporter of them, but they do not. What a huge pile of money we have ploughed into education during the past 40 years; it’s simply incredible! All for naught, as test scores swirl around the bottom of the toilet bowl.

Efforts like L3′s inspire hope. Efforts like these California fools in the video only strengthen the conviction that all is lost trusting these bozos.

It was funny watching so many players in that California con-job. The fundamental argument from the educators, once again, is, “We failed horribly, that’s why we need nore money!” But never have they had more money. Instead, they just suck.

They don’t know how to teach, or what to teach, or how to handle their children.

An epic, systemic fail — that smells as bad as a bad day back in “Gym”.

Just a quick comment. Can, or will, Buraq Hussein Obama be able or willing to do anything for the United States or its people? Can’t emphasize the NO properly enough without breaking the house rules.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the crunch is coming. The singularity that will determine our future.

As a side note:

#29 hdgreene

Here’s Peggy Noonan, a former supporter whose head has recently emerged from her butt:

Peggy Noonan made her choice as to which side she was on. She took the dictator’s shilling. No one who cares for the country should listen to her, Parker, or Frum any more than the Continental Congress would have listened to Benedict Arnold if he had decided after the Battle of Cowpens that he would rather wear Continental uniform again.

I am hearing of almost unbelievable rumors that the contaminants, used to disperse the oil slick, could conceivably, in the event of a hurricane, cause catastrophic damage throughout the path of the hurricane’s storm surge. Does anyone have any credible sources for this?

The central conflict is between the political class and their retainers versus the people who actually produce goods and services that other folks actually want. The parasitic class remains supreme for the moment but it appears they have reached the limits of how much they can suck out of their hosts. As they see it the question is not really how to improve the health of the host, the question is one of how to retain their own power, status, and privileges. The health of the host is purely a side issue, a matter of abstract theory. Its sort of like a farmer not wanting to be cruel to his pigs even though he understands they will all be translated into bacon and pork chops in the future. If it takes too much effort or money to be kind then screw that notion.

This is the scary thing. The changes that are coming from necessity will not be driven with the end of solving the underlying fundamental problems but rather from the perspective of how the ruling elites can hold on to their existing power and privileges. And everyone else be damned.

I find it ironic that the essential prediction of Marxism, that of class conflict leading to fundamental change, does seem to be coming true, but not as envisioned. In the Marxist model it was capitalism that was unsustainable because it would lead to the impoverishment of the workers. Instead it is the welfare state that was constructed on Marxist notions of what a utopia would be like that has or is leading to the impoverishment of the workers.

I have never attempted to visualize world peace. But I have attempted to visualize Nancy Pelosi on a street corner holding up a sign reading “Will work for Food.” Its just wishful thinking on my part, but I too, like the political class, am entitled to my fantasies as well.

Wretchard, the ethnicity is NOT immaterial. I doubt you would say that of say, a Japanese elected President of the Philippines. Nor would most people in the Philippines say so.

Race matters. In fact, it matters MOST because it answers one simple question, whose side are you on?

The answer to what happens when everything turns up empty, is that a crook of your own ethnicity will try and cheat most often, someone of another. Or, to put in extreme measures, do a full “Reginald Denny” ala Damien “Football” Williams.

Wretchard’s blind spot is that he grew up in a mono-ethnic society. How can someone from the Philippines, or China, or Vietnam, understand what drives American society? The fading guilt over “original Racist sin” or the Black Nationalist anger and fear of “not being Black enough?” Or being called an Oreo, or fake-Hispanic, or anything like that, and it actually matter. The Philippines and Vietnam are not being inundated by a foreign, different-language speaking group from a neighboring nation with reconquista and pan-ethnic pretensions to hemisphere-wide revolution. When have Filipinos ever been called “fake?” The question of “side” by race haunts every non-White when they try to stop racial spoils systems. Meanwhile Whites are finally awakening to the Game and seeing how screwed they are.

Wretchard’s question about what happens when everything runs out, or there is a huge crisis, has been answered repeatedly in American History. From the New York City Draft Riots, to the formation of the Klan, to its revival in the 1920′s, to Reginald Denny getting his head bashed in, race in fact matters the most. Not the least of which is that it turns crook-dom onto people of other races. No, we can’t all just get along. We never did, we never will, that’s part of human nature.

During the Depression, FDR deported every Mexican he could find and prevented the few Black union organizers from moving further. Having a “fake INS” routine is pretty dangerous … it says that the Government is ON THE OTHER SIDE. Ala the fuss about Arizona. Based on RACE. [Whites from say, the Ukraine, laboring in Dallas, would be swiftly deported.]

Race is probably the most important thing in a leader in a multi-racial society. It always has been, and always will be.

Earl Scruggs music may have been an apt background for Bonnie and Clyde, but this document evokes an image more along the line of the Keystone Cops. Unfortunately this Bag of Rags that has risen to a cacophony under the current conductor is appropriate background for the cops and robbers antics. I just can’t figure out who the good guys are supposed to be.

“And as f47 points out, those who do have incomes will have to spend the extra money on imports.”

Did you miss the part where you eliminate or reduce welfare?
Jobs go overseas because the unskilled labor there is cheaper. Enough cheaper to make up for increased cost in other areas. Without that welfare check, those unemployed will have to either get a job or starve. A few days without eating and any job looks pretty good.
Once the American worker becomes competitive wage-wise, those jobs will stop going overseas.

The key for the worker to a better life is the same it has always been. Get an education. Minimum wage workers get paid minimum wage because they are not worth anything more then minimum wage. They have not improved their marketable skills to where they can demand more then minimum wage.
Referring to a previous post, 13$ an hour is suck wages for a carpenter. My brother owned a carpenter business up until late ’08. He started guys at 18 and his lead man was getting 25. And those were average for this area.
So no, nobody is going to work for 13 that has been making 15. Cut welfare and the income tax and things will pick up to the point where carpenters will make 15 to 20 again.

Some jobs cannot be shipped off shore. Most as a matter of fact. Only the industrial labor jobs can. That is because building a factory somewhere is cheap and easy. All you need is a reasonably flat bit of ground and a labor source. America has plenty of both, so long as those laborers don’t expect to buy a Lexus and a 4200 Sq. Ft. home with all the amenities on a minimum wage paycheck.

IIRC, UAW wages start at about 25$. For unskilled/semi-skilled labor. That is why the Japanese can build better cars and then pay to ship them across an ocean and still beat the US car corps in both price and quality. AFAIK, the average wage for the Japanese is about 18$. It’s been over a decade since I was directly involved so I’m positive those numbers have changed. I doubt that they have changed for the better.

40 Subotai: “Peggy Noonan made her choice as to which side she was on. She took the dictator’s shilling. No one who cares for the country should listen to her, Parker, or Frum any more than the Continental Congress would have listened to Benedict Arnold if he had decided after the Battle of Cowpens that he would rather wear Continental uniform again.”

I couldn’t agree more. I’m paraphrasing, and can’t remember who said it, but I’ve read that it’s been said that “that idea is so stupid that only an intellectual could believe it”. Describes Noonan et.al. perfectly.

I hope that they’re enjoying being the “House Conservative” at all of their cocktail parties, because they’ve sacrificed their credibility to achieve that status. No one with any sense would credit anything Noonan says.

Re: Whiskey @ 17: Correct on your MA analysis. The State Senate vote is “employment security”- for the Legislators. They know that voting this in will be good in November, but they also know that Patrick can sustain a veto, so they are in effect throwing the Guv under the bus. His veto will likewise be remembered on election day. Fonman

“Gee, I didn’t know we were even allowed to use “illegal immigrants,” or worse, “illegal aliens.””

They’re undocumented Democrats.

They provided unlimited low cost labor to business and services to individuals which depressed the wage levels of local citizens and transferred the usual expense of workers comp, unemployment, and other state mandated labor laws directly upon the tax payers rather than the direct consumer. In the ying and yang of economics, it was redistribution of costs which as long as the economy was running along were just as much an ‘invisible hand’ to the society as any other aspect of the market place. Now that the economy is not running along, its presence and real price comes into the public’s field of view. The cancer to the system of following that economic ‘hit’ of unregulated cheap labor is now coming to roost. For a political party that is so much about controlling nearly every aspect of business, the Democrats lust for power is amply demonstrated by their reluctance to really attempt to manage the labor resource side of the business model which would mean controlling immigration.

Rosinante @ 45: “Jobs go overseas because the unskilled labor there is cheaper.”

That’s part of it. But only part. People around the world buy goods manufactured in Germany — hardly a low-wage country. And why have skilled jobs been lost from the US, if the problem is only low-skilled wages?

Every business is different, but in many industries (such as computer chip manufacturing — now overseas), the cost of labor is only a small part of the finished product price. However, all US businesses have to struggle with excessive regulations and the unholy overhead of a government hiring regulators who work hard to make it more difficult for the taxpayers to stay in business.

A country can have high wages. Or it can have high regulation. It can’t have both. Not in the long term — as even Germany will find out in the coming years.

The problems are not only the cost of regulation that drives away skilled jobs and the cost of labor that drives away unskilled jobs. The third component of the engine of economic destruction is cultural. American low skill labor is unemployable at almost any wage rate. It does not cost the $1/hr a more motivated and skilled worker in a place like China or the $2 a worker in India costs to employ an American, it does not cost the $7/hr that people think after looking at the minimum wage rate. It does not cost the $15/hr or so that some can calculate, I have not gotten the exact numbers but they are out there, after adding in mandated regulations and benefits. The actual cost includes the wages of all the Supervisors and EEO counselors and Lawyers needed to follow around the low skill American worker and get them to do anything without putting the company out of business.

Under those circumstances the added costs of translation, coordination and shipping needed to move manufacturing overseas become no barrier. The costs of moving overseas are predictable and decline over time. The costs of remaining in America increase over time. The only industries that cannot move offshore are agriculture and mining, including energy extraction. The former is composed of less than 2% of the workforce and that is under pressure from inheritance taxes. The latter is being eliminated by environmental regulations. The difference between America and the 3rd world commodity producers in 10 years may be that they can generate income by exporting commodities while we refuse to. My expectation however is that by that time the Chinese will have gained control of the extractable resources and we shall see the regulations relaxed.

Rosinante @45: The key for the worker to a better life is the same it has always been. Get an education.

Sorry, no. The problem is far worse than that. Got a billion Chinese with educations. Got a billion Indians with education, and they mostly even speak English, more or less.

I’m sure education is better than ignorance, but it’s not the answer to current macroeconomic issues. Heck, I wish members of Congress would go back to school and get some advanced degrees, and Obama seems to want to become a petroleum engineer.

LOTM @ 50: Another problem with American business is the moral hazard of management, not labor. Since the start of the bubble we’ve had this jackpot mentality in business, executive compensation soaring in big companies while average compensation stagnates and declines, in startups the VCs get rich, the three or four organizers get rich, and even with their stock options, the actual workers, even with advanced degrees, do not get rich, work at net wages half what they were twenty years ago – and startups are a high-risk environment, most will simply work at the low wages for a year or two, company will fail, options worthless, net wages horribly low.

–

Why are we talking economy? Oh, right, shell game is Obama moving from “military might” to “prosperity”. May I suggest his example is that being a community organizer pays off, more than, say, drilling for oil? How long can that go on?

Since the start of the bubble we’ve had this jackpot mentality in business, executive compensation soaring in big companies while average compensation stagnates and declines.

Josh is correct. There was no valid economic reason to ship high tech manufacturing offshore, other than to increase profits, which were already solid, in order to get huge payouts to upper management and big shareholders (aka “upper management”). American companies totally dominated high tech manufacturing, and provided hundreds of thousands of well paying manufacturing and assembly jobs. There was no competition in sight because of the huge lead we had on intellectual content and knowledge.

If American companies didn’t take the work and knowledge to China and India and elsewhere, damn near every PC in the world would still be made in America today, along with all the other high tech kit. Companies like Lucent and Cisco and Intel weren’t money losing affairs that had to offshore to save the company. They were hugely profitable, but the management wasn’t satisified being merely wealthy.

Some of this, I think, was the Bill Gates phenomenon. When Gates became “the richest man in the universe,” other tech execs just didn’t feel that rich anymore. So they figured out a way to get there, by screwing their employees and screwing their country.

China’s economic explosion was entirely enabled by American companies, to our great detriment.

“There was no valid economic reason to ship high tech manufacturing offshore, other than to increase profits,….”

Aside from the kind of government regulation that requires safety handrails on strip club stages and shuts small companies down because of one complaint of discrmination in hiring, there are taxes to consider.

The Chinese offer much more attractive depreciation on new factories and equipment than the U.S. does. And that is just one aspect of the tax situation.

But I am personally convinced that moving jobs overseas was driven as much by management fads as it was by profits. Everybody is doing it so you figure you have to also.

A friend of mine’s company got with the current fad, opened a factory overseas, then did the math once they saw the real costs, including transportation. They then closed down that factory and reopened a closed Rubbermaid factory in N.C. And this was a low tech product: brooms.

Wel, in my friend’s case, I guess there are planning estimates and then there is reality when the bills start coming in – after a big jump in fuel prices, for example. Transportation costs were causing them to make less money than they were by making the product in the USA.

At last my friend’s company was able to admit they made a mistake – which you can do pretty easily with a a small company that has been owned by the same family for at least 3 generations and run by hard-headed men with engineering degrees. For bigger firms it is no doubt more complicated in many ways. Enormous effort often goes into avoiding saying “We screwed up!”

“I couldn’t agree more. I’m paraphrasing, and can’t remember who said it, but I’ve read that it’s been said that “that idea is so stupid that only an intellectual could believe it”. Describes Noonan et.al. perfectly.”

I have to confess that I’m completely confused by Peggy Noonan. Here she was a former speech writer for Ronald Reagan and part of Reagan’s inner circle. She should have been very politically savvy and immediately recognized Obama for what he was but instead she supported him. In stark contrast, I’m a no account engineer with no formal political training and yet I instantly saw Obama as a tin plated demagogue who had no business serving as a US senator let alone President.

How could Noonan have been so wrong?

Did Obama’s skin color confuse here? Was she seduced into group-think by the MSM liberals who surround her? Did she really want to be Obama’s “house conservative”?

Folks here are talking about $13 an hour jobs as if that’s gonna get it done. Well, for single men or married with wives who work yes. For married men whose wives either are having babies or cannot work full-time for health reasons, no. Unless they can take that second job in the evenings, weekends, etc that will pay equal to or lesser than unemployment after tax. So probably private security guards or front desk since those jobs occasionally permit some time to look for another job or study some vocational books in the wee small hours. Slave like Chinese, as Marie Claude said? Even some of them commit suicide after a while in the Iphone factory. There have been thousands of small incidents across China in the last ten years that the Chinese have successfully hidden from the world. I do not think the global race to the bottom is bottomless nor are the Chinese as compliant hive dwellers as often portrayed from the outside.

I keep hearing conservatives carp about ‘subsidizing unemployment’ with these extensions. How many marriages would crack up, how many people would lose custody of their kids, if they dropped it completely in this Mancession?

Perhaps it’s all just delaying the inevitable recognition that millions of formerly middle class people will soon have to join the burgeoning underclass if they already have not, when there is absolutely NOTHING in reply to their applications for professional level jobs for six or eight or nine months. When recruiters keep posting the same ‘zombie jobs’ over and over again rather than fill them and rarely can be bothered to reply. When the typical interview process even for the successful applicant takes five months. When if you show up in person to get around these barricades they (usually a middle aged big butted lady) stare at you like you’re crazy.

I don’t know about most BCers, but Whiskey with his Reconquista/race-obsession at least gets one thing right: there are millions of jobs that formerly would have gone to the native born that corporations prefer to hire illegals or the barely literate for (that eliminates the quip just go work at McDonalds and you’ll soon be a manager – not these days unless your name is Jose). In a sense, simply by being born in the early 80s and not having parents willing to subsidize eight or ten years of education, one is underqualified for the professional jobs left (particularly in the increasingly bloated health care sector, which I predict is one of the last bubbles since it has been coddled from medical tourism and cheap overseas pharmaceuticals), and overqualified by virtue of speaking English and having a college degree for many of the jobs that employers rightly suspect the employee would leave as soon as they are able. And where is the vast network of community colleges with evening classes that can train Americans, or even try to teach them Chinese or Hindi so the more adventurous can give the Baby Boomers hogging the marketplace declaring ‘pay your dues and don’t be a breadwinner till you’re 60′ the bird, and go work (and maybe marry) abroad?

I spent some time in Russia for a very simple reason – at least over there, twentysomethings are given real responsibility and decent paying jobs (for example you actually see some presenters on TV under the age of 40, unlike CNN/Fox/MSNBC), and they’re having babies as a result. The incomes on paper appear lower particularly with the high housing costs but once you factor in that 13% fat tax and the lower cost of FOOD ($500 a month versus $1000 a month)/quality health care it starts to balance out. And there are no parking Gestapo in Moscow waiting to squeeze you around every corner like in Brooklyn or Boston. Russians tolerate big injustices but revolt against the petty theft Americans put up with in many cases.

Outside of the 29 year olds almost finishing up medical school, a few lucky law school grads and some engineers, I don’t see so much of that among the folks I knew in college.

“But I am personally convinced that moving jobs overseas was driven as much by management fads as it was by profits. Everybody is doing it so you figure you have to also.”

I think this error was a “Matryoshka doll”, i.e. fallacies embedded within fallacies embedded within fallacies.

At the root was the world facing depletion of cheap natural resources (Peak Oil) coupled with globalism putting America’s unionized overpaid blue collar worker in direct competition against China’s industrial slaves. The next level beyond that was the notion that manufacturing was a fungible sucker’s game, i.e. it’s much “better” to be a FIRE economy (Finance Insurance and Real Estate) and let the Chinese and developing world go broke chasing after manufacturing (Why a FIRE economy was “better” was never actually explained). The next level beyond that put sophisticated criminals in the banking and finance industries in the position of making lots of money through the FIRE economy. Naturally they did everything they could to accelerate the transition from manufacturing to FIRE.

Of course, now we’re screwed big time. This economic transition process has been going on since the 1970s. We need to start transitioning back to where we were before. How we’re going to do that given we’re nearly insolvent is anyone’s guess.

I mentioned the generational warfare aspect of this Great Recession/Depression 2.0 in particular because my friends in Russia have seen this happen before.

There was nothing really that made 40-somethings who survived Perestroika and the devastation of the 90s less employable, at least when it came to the men. But Russian employers preferred to hire young people anyway, which is what made the last few years in Moscow a kind of golden age for twentysomethings compared to the tepid if not crappy job market in the U.S. Simply put, not only was it feis control when it came to the ladies (a 22 year old personal assistant versus a 39 year old) but also the notion that those who had to sell cheapjacks, drive taxis and scrub toilets to survive the 90s were not going to adapt to professional jobs as well as the 20 somethings fresh out of school (particularly the MGUs and MGIMOs).

And so what I don’t want to see when the economy finally does start to recover is millions of my fellow Gen-Yers who were told in the 2010s to patiently wait and take any job to make it then informed that they are not capable of doing anything else and that some snot nosed 22 year old out of Harvard is so much better qualified or coachable in 2025 after the great global default/deflation in real estate (and too boot, those 22 year olds would finally be able to afford housing in major cities when Boomers/Gen Xers have to sell at any price, even at a loss compared to their 2000 buying levels – boo freaking hoo for them, people need somewhere liveable to start having babies again).

In that light, ‘Going Galt’ by working abroad or starting one’s own cash driven business with whatever capital one can scrounge seems preferable than getting perpetually kicked to the curb.

I just get sick to my stomach when there is the presumption that those presently employed are by Darwinian selection all better, smarter than those not employed. The Atlantic Monthly did an article a few months back saying those now unemployed can expect to make less over a lifetime thanks to their lost years versus those lucky enough to have graduated earlier. To which I say: screw that. Wretchard with his mocking of the boomlet in 100k a year plus federal hiring at least deflates that bubble.

Getting an education is a great idea for everybody. Million dollar a year running backs need to have an MBA to figure out where to invest ‘da muny’. But what an asinine notion that all Americans should be fast-tracked to University so they can help fill the growing field of neurosurgery. You can export a person across the world to have their brain worked on pretty efficiently but you can’t send your car out to the panel beater unless you live on the border. And until they have cheap intercontinental transport, your Dominos delivery will not be network hub-bed out of Bejing.

And here is where the average brainiac doesn’t get it; they have high re-investment and multi-year plans in bumphuck-East and they have already amortized high levels of automation, more so than here in the US. Their electricity is cheaper but you’d think it was because they have more robotics than we. They own their markets because a bunch of Harvard MBA’s weren’t allowed to raid the nation’s wealth like they have here. Totalitarianism has its charm, but try that sh!t in China that they did while bagging US business and manufacturing technology in the eighties and it would have earned you a bullet in the head. The elites sold our businesses out and made up for it by importing working slaves for their benefit.

and all that at a pedestrian level, consider why George Soros is not international public enemy number one and get back to me.

peterike, I think the execs hands are forced, they don’t move offshore for greed, they really have to do it – or someone else will.

Granted my rant was simplistic, and there are a thousand variables in the mix, but I was referring specifically to high tech jobs. Even with the onerous US regulations (clearly another huge part of the problem), tech companies were able to create the greatest products in the world at a sizeable profit margin. Even with union labor, which was on the floor at many Bell Labs/Lucent facilities that were turning out telecom equipment, fibre optic gear and so forth could be made at great profit.

As for “if you don’t move, someone else will,” that speaks to the perfidy of the executive class to begin with. Any CEO of a US-based, highly profitable enterprise who decides to ship work overseas simply to make more money is a scoundrel and a traitor. Again, this isn’t making t-shirts. There were no cheap market alternatives. The only other manufacturers were large European quasi-state run companies like Alcatel, Siemens and Nokia.

It speaks perhaps most of all to the foolishness of the government. Letting high tech manufacturing leave our shores was economically illiterate and frankly insane from the point of view of national security. But who pushed for it? The pols weren’t allowing offshoring out of some Libertarian ideology of free trade. They pimped for it because their palms were being greased by the vendors.

The Silicon Valley execs of the 90s were no longer patriots, god knows, and not really even citizens. They belong to the tranzi class that Subotai likes to refer to as TWANLOC. “What’s right for America” didn’t enter their minds for as much as a second.

“Race is probably the most important thing in a leader in a multi-racial society. It always has been, and always will be.”

I think you are projecting. It doesn’t matter a hill of beans to me. Never has never will. Although I might be projecting also, growing up a diplo-brat and often being the only white bread around.
Regardless, you have any evidence? Just Data please, I’ll find my own facts.

BTW, a simple way to have stopped the BP OIL spill would have been to shutdown ALL their other platforms until they ‘stopped’ the leak. BP didn’t want to stop the leak, they wanted to redirect that leak into a suitable container.

Regulations are useless if they are ignored. If they are ignored, or removed, when something goes wrong, Lawyers get involved. Then it gets real expensive. If you have to choose between regulations or Lawyers, take the regulations.
Sonce something ALWAYS goes wrong, if you followed the regulations, you should be protected from Lawyers. THAT is the real purpose of regulations. Fending off ambulance chasers.

No traction on the Sestak affair. They made him an offer, which he misunderstood. It was a valid offer, one for which he is well qualified. He refused, wanting to take his shot in an election. Prove otherwise.
Meanwhile for 500 ALex, who is Raymond Edwin “Ray” Mabus, Jr.

“But I am personally convinced that moving jobs overseas was driven as much by management fads as it was by profits. Everybody is doing it so you figure you have to also.”

Answer:
Because of POS’s like John Naisbitt- Megatrends was about the emerging service economy and why manufacturing was archaic.

“His international bestseller Megatrends sold more than 9 million copies and was on the New York Times bestsellerlist for more than two years, mostly as number one. John Naisbitt published the international bestsellers Re-inventing the Corporation in 1985, Megatrends 2000 in 1990, which was published in 32 countries and was the Number One bestseller in the U.S., Japan, and Germany, and Megatrends for Women in 1992 (co-authored with Patricia Aburdene). His Japanese language book, Japan’s Identity Crisis, was released in 1992 and was a bestseller in Japan. “

John now has his own China Institute where he counsels the Chinese on how to profit from the disaster he helped create in the United States by encouraging the big sellout.

Is what’s happening now in the USA any different from the democracy to plutocracy transitions that occurred during the democratic period in Greece, the Roman Republic in the 1st Century BC, and the several Italian city-states in the 1500s and 1600s? The fiction of Republican trappings persisted for two centuries in Rome.

Maybe the footprints of plutocracy are more open and apparent that at any time before in this Administration but the underlying process has been going on since at least Woodrow Wilson’s time. No accident of history that Wilson was an academic who packed his administration with other never-had-to-meet-a-payroll academics. Same with FDR. Same-same Obama who has expanded the plutocracy to include labor union bosses.

If that is the case, and I think a good argument can made, the social dynamic has shifted and will continue to do so from the personal pursuit of entrepreneurship to the pursuit of any potentially valuable patron-client relationships you can establish for yourself and your children.

I suspect that the reach of Obama’s so called prosperous economy does not extend to you or me.

R/66–”BTW, a simple way to have stopped the BP OIL spill would have been to shutdown ALL their other platforms until they ’stopped’ the leak. BP didn’t want to stop the leak, they wanted to redirect that leak into a suitable container.”

Wow!!! All that engineering knowhow and years of experience and they just completely overlooked the “simple way”. ALL they had to do was “stop” the leak.

66. Rosinante
“Race is probably the most important thing in a leader in a multi-racial society. It always has been, and always will be.”

I think you are projecting. It doesn’t matter a hill of beans to me. Never has never will. Although I might be projecting also, growing up a diplo-brat and often being the only white bread around.

Whiskey is a favored target because he speaks outrageous things. Outrageous things aren’t necessarily incorrect. Do you wince at these “unspeakables” because you contend they are not true, or because you’ve been conditioned over the years to shun them?

Reverse discrimination is quite real. In the military, in the government, in the job place. It’s real because it works and it pays out and is just as much a part of the human condition as respiration.

With the opening to Western markets, suddenly, the world supply of very cheap labor increased by a billion workers. While there are definitely some additional costs and risks with operations in China, the incentives are just too real and tempting. If your firm doesn’t do it, your competitor will.

So American businessmen did what they do best – adjusted to maximize profits. A number of formerly US technological product lines were moved there. That’s OK since profits are transitory. Steam locomotives used to be a high profit business line too. What we have to do is keep ahead with NEW products and industries. To keep the stream of new, profitable products flowing, we need unfettered business, low taxes, good infrastructure, and skilled people. The latter especially need incentives.

Unfortunately, the Democrat platform meets few of these needs and look to retard US economic competitiveness.

I grew up in a world where I was acutely aware of racism, and only some of it was white on colored. A lot of it was colored on white and colored on colored. It was a world where people made fun of poor whites or half whites, where Chinese made fun of Malays, where Malays made fun of tribal negritos and where everyone made fun of blacks. It’s a topsy-turvey world; where tribesmen are glad you’re not “Filipino” (because lowlanders are landgrabbers); where Muslim rebels will refuse to talk Tagalog because that is an “invader’s langauge”; where Chinese are murdered and the police say “it’s ok. He’s only Chinese.” When I got older and traveled, friendly strangers would always misunderstand me.

“Oh, I see you’re hispanic from your name.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I didn’t know that you were American judging from your accent.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Canadian then?”

“No, not Canadian.”

“What are you?”

“I’m actually Australian.”

“Where were you born in Australia?”

“I wasn’t.”

And finally they give up. It’s almost like that scene from Raymond Chandler’s Playback.

He nodded.

“No baggage?”

“Nine pieces. I helped him load it. He checked out. Satisfied?”

“You checked with the office?”

“He had his bill. All paid up and receipted.”

“Sure. And with that amount of baggage a hop came with him naturally.”

“The elevator kid. No hops on until seven-thirty. This was about one A.M.”

“Which elevator kid?”

“A Mex kid we call Chico.”

“You’re not Mex?”

“I’m part Chinese, part Hawaiian, part Filipino, and part ni*ger. You’d hate to be me.”

“Just one more question. How in hell do you get away with it? The muggles, I mean.”

He looked around. “I only smoke when I feel extra special low. What the hell’s it to you? What the hell’s it to anybody? Maybe I get caught and lose a crummy job. Maybe I get tossed in a cell. Maybe I’ve been in one all my life, carry it round with me. Satisfied?” He was talking too much. People with unstable nerves are like that. One moment monosyllables, next moment a flood. The low tired monotone of his voice went on.

People say the passage is racist, but they’re missing the key riff: You don’t want to walk around in a cell of your construction your whole life. It’s tiresome. Here in Australia almost everybody I don’t know takes me for American and asks me for my home state. It’s too complicated to explain, so I just nod my head when they mention any of the fifty. Finally I got to the idea that all this race stuff is a crock of sh**. There’s some validity to it, to be sure. You take it into account when going into a scene. You are sensitive to what things to say, or not to say just because you don’t want to spit in the soup. Because it’s pointless to give gratuitous offense. But ultimately at rock bottom it was truly a crock of sh**.

What is truly important, whether you’re dealing with white, yellow, black or brown and all the shades in between and whether you’re dealing with Muslim, Christian or Jew is the man himself. It’s true that you can’t take the racial or cultural aspects out of the equation, but it’s not the controlling thing, at least in my experience. All people can be racist, and to some extent it is always stupid. How strange it was to discover that in Africa two black guys can meet each other on a trail and hack each other to pieces because one belongs to Tribe A and the other to Tribe B.

People can get stuck up on this stuff, but it’s not worth it. It’s a waste of time.

It’s true that you can’t take the racial or cultural aspects out of the equation, but it’s not the controlling thing, at least in my experience.

That is my experience also. Race is irrelevant compared to the character of the person you are dealing with.

Same with Muslims. I can say with 100% conviction that Islam is the greatest evil to befall humankind but that does not automatically extend to individuals who identify as Muslim who can be any kind of person at all because of or despite their religious identity.

When you start talking about groups the dynamics can change. People have been making generalizations about the other since forever. Some of them are more accurate than not.

One of the pernicious (un)intended consequences of progressivism as we know it is that rights get attached to groups and never to individuals. I think that the whole concept of human rights should get tossed in the garbage can and replaced in writing and conversation with individual rights.

Obama made an ad for the DNC and specifically asked blacks and hispanics to vote for Dems to continue his program. What is the effect of a comment like that other than to make the rest of us look at blacks and hispanics as probable government sponsored aggressors? I never saw a peep about that comment in the MSM. I think it one of the most outrageous statements ever made by POTUS at any time.

Wretchard and I are talking two different things. He’s talking about individuals. I don’t care about individuals, since they don’t matter in politics — I am talking about mass behavior. Particularly in a crisis, particularly in an economic crisis. I would agree that in person-to-person interactions, Wretchard is correct, when dealing in polite society and not a riot. Wretchard’s prescription of course has been shown to be failed, discontinuous, in riots and crises. Anyone who saw the Rodney King riots knows this well.

But in discussing Obama’s Shell Game, we are not talking about person-to-person politics mediated by polite society. I am quite sure that Louis Farrakhan and David Duke would be polite in person to each other despite each wishing the other not in existence. Does that explain the aggregate behavior of their followers, or how each wields or does not, political and social power?

Wretchard’s argument is essentially Rand Paul’s and other Libertarians, that individualism matters not race, or background, or class. I argue that it does in fact matter, it matters the most once you get past individuals which is what politics and policy is, when you get down to it. GROUP BEHAVIOR.

The CIA World Factbook, lists the Philippines net migration as -1.3%. Unlike the US, the Philippines does not experience a constant, near 40 year inflows of significantly different people in race, identity, and language who openly advocate reconquista and demographic superiority. Instead, net out-migration characterizes the Philippines.

TFR for the Philippines is 3.23 — compared to below replacement for White Americans. Filipinos won’t be a third class minority in their own nation anytime soon.

Can anyone imagine Filipinos tolerating groups flying say, the Japanese flag, and chanting slogans that Japan will take back the Philippines as “stolen, occupied land?” Telling Filipinos to “go back” to some other country they’ve never seen?
————————-
“How strange it was to discover that in Africa two black guys can meet each other on a trail and hack each other to pieces because one belongs to Tribe A and the other to Tribe B.”
————————-
Why would that be strange? Is it not all of human behavior throughout recorded history? Is this not part of Darwinism, and evolution? To prefer one’s own extended genetic family to a strangers? To figure they’d be better off if the other group was dead, so resources all went to people with far more closely related genes? From “the Usual Suspects” to Rwanda, this is universal human behavior. It is heck, universal mammalian behavior in socially organized mammals. [Folks hate science and Darwin when it points out human behavior is closely related to other mammals.]

This is my critique of Wretchard’s, and Rand Paul’s, and Libertarian policy and ideals. In that it fails to adequately predict human behavior in aggregate. And therefore offers no policy prescriptions, indeed makes things worse, by completely mis-understanding human nature by being appalled at the ugly parts of it and recoiling into ideology not science.

America is an Anglo-Celtic-African culture, with the African part a minor but important key in the culture and politics. It has required, traditionally, growth and opportunity to mitigate eternal and unsolvable conflicts. When pressed by downturns economically, Americans act like Indian tribes with a Casino, and start kicking folks out or prevent opportunities. In good times we all “get along” by “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.” Not romantic but sound public policy rarely is.

This is MASS / GROUP behavior. Ayn Rand individualism, Daniel Boone frontier fantasies, John Stossel Libertarianism, offers a fantasy ideology to retreat from the reality, but nothing that actually works.

Unlike Wellington Webb or Tom Bradley, two dull but competent politicians who had to appeal to White voters and could not rely on Tammany Hall ethno-centrism ala Tip O’Neil, Obama has his entire career made a point of providing Black political patronage to folks like Valerie Jarrett, connected to Louis Farrakhan. He is incapable of grasping White group dynamics. That Whites may be subject to intra-group struggles over Class (Tina Fey vs. Sarah Palin) but the great mass are awakening to how the spoils are being divided and want their own fair share.

Is this not a huge question for Disparate Impact? If as public policy, we want the highest scoring firefighters, regardless of race … they will be almost entirely WHITE.

BUT … Libertarians who say “race does not matter” ignore the disparate impact ruling by the Supreme Court, allowing more than 6,000 Black applicants who did not have a minimum score to sue to become firefighters. Presumably, White firefighters with higher scores will have to be fired in favor of Black applicants with lesser scores.

Would you want a potential firefighter to rescue you to be Black? Or the one who had the highest score on the test (and therefore almost always White)? Will the US follow current policy and reserve most jobs in Government and Private Industry for non-Whites? Have White men lost faith in Obama, almost completely, and White women also, though more proportionally still have some faith in him? Do Blacks at 98% still support Obama?

Are critical resource allocation and spoils division decisions in the works at a time of lowered not rising expectations and income?

Obama must offer the White majority results. Rising income, or expectations of same, or at least preference in hiring by government and other institutions, not being last in line. That was OK when good times were rolling but now the only thing rolling is oil onto the Gulf Coast shoreline.

This runs right up against his Black base, that supports him 98%, that THEY will come first in any patronage, government hiring, and so on. Something Obama his entire career has done as well. There are only so many jobs available. Racial preferences for Blacks and Hispanics means Whites lose out. This is even worse with open borders.

Yes, but years before Naisbitt came along, back in the mid-70′s the “post-industrial society” was a standard concept in the Left, pushed as part of the 60′s Anti-war counterculture.

I never understood just what it meant; like Obama it was what people chose to see in it. It was like AGW for an era in which they assured us a New Ice Age was coming. As an engineer I took it to mean de-emphasizing the productive professions in favor of others that are less inherently useful. I have no doubt to the Marxists it meant American weakness in all things.

So yes, in terms of events driving Obama’s shell game, race is the deciding factor.

No other country in the world gives birthright citizenship to illegals, so in line with Justice Kennedy’s, Sotomayor’s, Ginsburg’s, soon to be Kagan’s, and of course Obama’s interpretation, that the Constitution is superceded by international law and “standards” … this is possible and legal to do: eliminate birthright citizenship.

Again, its like an Indian tribe with a Casino, only in reverse. Lets be honest, what hard-pressed White guy would not agree that its better to kick illegals and their kids out of the US, so there is more money and opportunity for him? Certainly La Raza has made it a point to tell said White guy he’s toast, long term.

Why does Smiley defend Islam? Easy, Islam is the enemy of White America. Enemy of my Enemy. Josh Howard of the Dallas Mavericks explained it to everyone.

What does the Supreme Court decision mean? It means that employers will have to choose Black applicants over qualified ones. And with the end of entrepreneurial start-ups, the White guys friend, where fast and good beats overseas or H1-B cheap, or Politically Correct, and tilting of the field to big corporations, White guys in particular are excluded.

Practically, what does this do? It erodes margin, concessions White guys will make to buy political peace, and caring about the slinging of “racist.” It provokes a naked spoils fight without apologies. Which has the potential to be healthy if moderated and not taken to extremes. However, the longer Obama has power to make decisions, the less this moderation is likely.

The best event would be a Republican take-over of Congress, both houses, and explicit White group spoils and identity politics, making Obama a 19th Century powerless President, able to cut ribbons and declare National Eggplant Day, but not much else. Congress is always more moderate than a powerful executive. Not the least of which is shorter election cycles for the House.

@66 Last I heard the costs to BP are at $930M and counting, BP stock is under $43 a share (down from the low sixties in April),eleven workers killed, X amount of gallons a day lost @ $74 a barrel,not to mention the future costs of fines,legal fees,etc. Do you really believe they didn’t want to stop the leak? What’s in it for them to let it continue?

Peterike @ 65 re the offshoring of US industry: “But who pushed for it? The pols weren’t allowing offshoring out of some Libertarian ideology of free trade. They pimped for it because their palms were being greased by the vendors.”

That’s a negatory, good buddy. The politicians were not paid off by vendors; they were following the political fad of anti-industrial so-called “environmentalists”. Politicians got big payouts/campaign contributions from foundations (originally built on profits made off industry) to shut down icky industry.

The only other example I can think of was the British upper class in the early 20th Century, who started to look down their noses at dirty, noisy, profitable industry. Well, turning their backs on industry certainly worked for the Brits, didn’t it?

The strange thing is that excessive greeniness need not automatically translate into the banishment of industry. Germany ranks second to none in its preening environmentalism — nor in its heavy industry. It would be interesting to know how Germans have managed to square that circle.

The basic problem for the US is that the elites have lost interest in the goose that lays the golden eggs. They no longer see the golden eggs; they only see the bird-droppings on the lawn and complain about getting kept awake by the quacking at night. They assume they can get rid of the goose, and somehow still benefit from the golden eggs.

The solution is to trade in the current failed elites for a new set. There is a lot of capital in the world looking for good investments. Re-industrializing the US would be a great investment opportunity — fueled by nuclear fission, mining transportation fuels from coal & oil shale, expanding agriculture with desalinated water. But the current elites may insist that we pry our economic freedom out of their cold dead fingers.

imho Whiskey & Wretchard are both right for the same reason that Freud and Jung are both right.There is individual behavior and there is group behavior.

That said

consider

It’s true that you can’t take the racial or cultural aspects out of the equation, but it’s not the controlling thing,
………
Ask yourself what is the controlling thing when O slaps the british queen on the back, bows to the saudi king, bows to the japanese emperor, apologizes to the Mexican president and the Chinese delegation for the Arizona law.

peterike @ 65: The Chinese were going to clone most every western product whether it was under a US trademark or not. Yes, American execs helped accelerate the process, but I doubt they could have slowed it down by more than a tad, and probably at great loss for even trying. Ricardo’s “comparative advantage” runs rampant in an information age, cheap telecom, cheap world transport by air and ship. The only “answer” is the kind of protectionism that is supposed to be poison. Some are trying to revise the theory, as it doesn’t look good for us unless they can.

imho the discussion about the deindustrialization of the USA since the 70′s is the flip side of the discussion of the demonetization of Europe Early in the 20th century.

Why?

You have to ask yourself what happened in both periods.

What happened?

All through the 19th century the dominant energy was coal of which England and Germany had abundant domestic supplies. However, at the start of the 20th century oil use took off in a big way. How big and how amazing? Everyone has seen pictures of cities all over the world where one year there would be horse drawn carriages going up and down the streets and the next decade there would be cars going up and down the streets.

Neither Germany or England had any domestic supplies of oil. They had to import oil. That represents a significant wealth transfer.

How significant?

I think this is significant because in the 1970′s the US became a net oil importer, and net imports have grown every decade since accompanied by a slow relative decline.

I have seen graphs that show US government deficits trend south in a big way at the same time as the US became a net oil importer in the 1970′s.

The US is being defunded in a way that looks similiar to the way the Brits were defunded from 1900-50–because we are not producing our own source of energy.

(Yes yes, I agree that Europe was also sapped by two wars. And the Japanese have done well without their own source of oil–or energy of any kind. I also agree that the brits economy seemed to be rejuvenated by 30 years of north sea oil and as production has gone into steep decline –so also has the british economy and yes I agree there are other factors too in britian recent troubles.)

But consider the a country with the opposite problem. This article discusses Medvedev’s problem with high oil prices.

Trying to watch PBS Washington Week, talking about the oil spill … b-but there are birds, oh the horror! And, discussing that things are a mile down and difficult, and Obama even said today that first guesses may not work, the (mostly female) talking heads on WW say, “… but is this politically acceptable?”

Now, that’s an interesting question, because Obama, too, up until now, has acted like he, or someone, only had to snap their fingers, and the hole would be plugged. This really *is* the education of Barack Hussein Obama into the ways of the world, and may be apply the lesson to little matters like Iran and Nork.

At least, Obama has an excuse, I suppose the poor, tortured souls at the table on WW will never, ever get used to the idea that the best batters in baseball only get a hit about a third of the time.

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and misdemeanors.

Do we now need a national education on what the meaning of Bribery is?

Obama has gotten, or always was, lazy because he never has had to deliver much up front in his 20 years of Chicago style corrupt dealmaking. He stiffed Blago and got away with it. He got the judge to unseal the Ryan divorce papers for nothing obvious. Now he has Rahm Emanuel, the snake that walks, arrange for Bill Clinton, a man unencumbered by sentimental illusions about Obama, to deliver to Sestak a job offer worse than the one that Lyndon Johnson used to sucker punch Arthur Goldberg off of the Supreme Court.

Perhaps they can come up with a defense here. The offer was so clearly laughable that it proves that the White House wasn’t seriously trying to bribe Sestak at all. What we had here was a diabolically clever triple cross to ensure that Sestak stayed in and won and get the unreelectable Arlen Spector eased out.

On the de-industrialization problem, there’s an eye-opening story brewing about the suicide cluster building in the facilities of Hon Hai Precision Industries. The Chinese company is one of the largest contract manufacturers in the world, making Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard products most notably. A rash of suicides has broken out wherein workers have been throwing themselves off of the high rise dormotories in which the company houses them. Twelve workers have tossed themselves off their balconies in the past few weeks.

News reports from the facility describe a garguantuan facility that puts the tragedy in a different perspective. They’ve got 400,000 people working at that one compound, and the company itself employs over 890,000 people. In other words, the company is a little smaller than Dallas, TX, in population terms. In such light these deaths, each highly tragic on a case by case basis, are simply overwhelmed by statistical measure. Has there been a run of 12 suicides within a short space of time in Dallas before? Well, yes there has. Does Stalin’s observation apply that one murder is crime but a million is a statistic?

The more you dig into the situation the more you comprehend the problem of dealing with this industrial giant and how the numbers, and then more numbers, simply blow your mind and steamroll you. The 400,000 workers in that one gated compound live in the company high rises, shop at the company store, and go to the company bars to unwind for a little kareoke and cold ones. They get paid about $130.00 per month, making iPads and such.

I bet you if you told one those workers that the iPad he just made would be sold for $600-$800 retail, you wouldn’t have a suicide problem, you’d have a riot.

Everything is hopelessly screwed up as you survey this scene. There’s no way to compete against Hon Hai other than perhaps building another one maybe the next poor country over. They’ll kill you on costs. There’s not much opportunity working for Hon Hai, and winding up owing your soul to the company store. The currency and financial arragements stand as impregnable barriers to really do much about it.

It’s a sick, unnatural system that brutalizes everyone, even the schmuks buying the over-priced iPads. These arrangements will totter and fail, and they will cause great and lasting pain on all sides before they do.

Sestak originally claimed that the White House offered him a job to get out the Senate race, and rumor was that the job offered was Secretary of the Navy.

Look at the original interview of Sestak by a local Pennsylvania reporter wherein Sestak admitted these things, and it’s kind of laughable. It seemed like Sestak slipped up and walked straight into this thing unawares, maybe clueless of the legal implications.

The task for the White House then became this: distance the offer from any White House official; eliminate any allegation of a high value quid pro quo having been on the table; get both these things established in the narrative on a day when nobody’s paying much attention.

Viola! On the Friday before Memorial Day (optimal day) we get Bill Clinton (distanced from White House officialdom) offering a seat on a presidential advisory body (low value, unpaid, not quid pro quo).

I’d be shocked if all this isn’t the carefully arranged line of bs that it appears to be. But, so far, I think it will hold unless Sestak himself goes off the reservation and challenges the presented chain of events.

I doubt he will; again, it’s quite probable he walked into this whole mess foolishly and unawares.

Sestak looks like an utter moron to me. In fact when I see his name I have to do a double-take. It looks to much like Sleestak from Land of the Lost, in one of life’s grand and apropos ironies.

#81 “Do you really believe they didn’t want to stop the leak? What’s in it for them to let it continue?”

Not what I said. My bad, since as the communicator, the burden of being understood is my responsibility. Let me try again.
First ‘pluging” the leak stops the flow of OIL, which is under pressure. That means a new hole has to be drilled at enormous expense. What BP wanted to do was put a cover over the ‘leak’ (cap) and then go ahead and collect the OIL that was leaking. That way they didn’t lose the OIL and din’t have to pay for a new hole. So they gambled with some technology that hadn’t been done thousands of feet below sea level. They lost their gamble. Now they are really up sh1t creek without a paddle.
No way to know, but it’s most likely that BP had a meeting. At that meeting there were those that wanted to take the safe route, plug (not cap, there is a difference there which the talking heads seem unaware of) and re-drill. Somebody at that meeting talked the rest into capping and keeping the OIL that was leaking. If it had worked, it would have been brilliant. It didn’t, Now BP is out trillions before this is over. There might not be a BP. To big to fail was last year.
Now the person who made that call, to gamble with millions of peoples lives and a major environmental disaster, needs to be held accountable. Jail time.

That is why I say there is no traction on the Sestak matter. There is no smoking gun.
Now the GOP can do a Scooter Libby on this administration, but that is pointless. All it gets is revenge at the cost of creating sympathy. Sestak was running behind last I looked and while it’s to early for a poll to be worth the double click to see it, being ahead is ALWAYS better then being behind. Doesn’t matter if the election is tomorrow or in 6 months. So just let this one lie and bring it up again in a few months. Not as a crime, but as a cover-up.
As a crime, you need to produce that famous smoking gun. As a cover-up, you are asking where they hid the smoking gun. That is both a safer and stronger position. Got’cha politics.
If it’s a choice between a Senate seat or 5 years in the pen for some mid level flunky, Alex, I’ll take Senate Seats for 200.

How could someone who;
1. had no combat experience,
2. was extraordinarily political with ideological fringe positions on every issue,
3. is haplessly naive and clueless about dealing with ruthless dishonest people,
rise in the Navy and get promoted to 3 stars? If Mike Mullen hadn’t come along and fired the guy Sestak would have become CNO.

In 1986 Sestak worked for COMNACSURFPAC at Coronado CA as his Chief of Staff. I was there for a few months working in the Intel shop so I must have met the guy. By all accounts he seems to have been an efficient hardworking competent officer. The worst I have heard about him on a nonpolicy level is that as a Congressman he has an extraordinarily high level of staff turnover because he expects everyone to work as hard as he does.

That inability to deal with mediocrity can resonate with his current problem. One weakness in liberalism is that it assumes hard work and good intentions from everyone. Problems are assumed to be because of a failure in communication, not from bad intentions. Unproductive people are marginalized within the inner circle, liberals can be tougher bosses than conservatives, but they fail to extend to society as a whole the freedom to make those judgments that they exercise themselves. They can choose who to hire and fire as individuals but you or a “faceless corporation” they do not trust with the same authority. Oddly enough in the military it is very hard to fire someone, officers can get a bad Fitness Report but to actually remove a lazy sailor as opposed to letting them coast a few years can be difficult. Sestak has little training in how to handle the incompetent, less in how to deal with the unmotivated or indifferent, and none in how to deal with the hostile and malicious. He operated a very efficient ship but he never actually engaged an enemy.

Now we have a report that the job putatively offered to Sestak, on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, is one that as a sitting Member of Congress he was ineligible for.

Cowboy,
SECNAV would be a much bigger deal if it was offered. Do you have a source to link?

Rosinante @ 92: “What BP wanted to do was put a cover over the ‘leak’ (cap) and then go ahead and collect the OIL that was leaking.”

This is getting a little off topic, but let’s get the facts straight on this one.

BP has no, nada, zip interest in collecting the leaking oil as a way of making money.

Look back into the history of the oil industry. Up to the early 20th Century, drillers would drill, sometimes have a blowout which they could do nothing to prevent at that stage of industry development, and then collect the spilling oil. But this turned out to be incredibly inefficient. Most of the natural reservoir energy was wasted, leaving most of the oil behind still stuck underground. The development of technology to prevent blowouts was driven by the need to maximize oil recovery and profits. The environmental benefits were a nice extra. Nearly a century later, the same thing applies to BP’s offshore blowout. Even if BP was able to collect the leaking oil with zero environmental impact, BP would still go ahead and seal that well to prevent the waste of reservoir energy.

Now, is BP culpable in the blowout? From what has been published — Absolutely!

It looks like they started with a poor well design (which the government’s MMS approved). Then they took a series of short cuts to save time. At $1,000,000 per day for the rig, the pressure to save time is understandable — but actually short-circuiting normal safe operating procedures was incredibly stupid. Apparently, BP saved time by not running tools in the well to check if the final cement had been placed properly. Most damagingly, they saved time by starting to pump the heavy drilling mud (their safety net) off the rig before they had made sure the well was safe.

BP screwed up big time, and the executives deserve all the punishment they get. But it is nonsense to suggest that BP would be happy simply collecting the leaking oil.

Okay let’s get our facts straight. The Cap was only going to capture a maximum of 85% of the oil that was taking out of the well. It would have made a bad problem much better but not have fixed it. The oil the tanker would have sucked up – did suck up using the 5 mile tube – was contaminated with seawater and required additional refinement before it could be used. The two reliever wells were still the ultimate fix to the problem – but have they started drilling them? No. Why? Donno. But it seems that Obama ordered a “special review” of all offshore leases and then announced that no more new ones would be granted until…?

Now if that sounds absurd, – putting the brakes on a fix to a major problem – then you have not worked in DC. Sounds perfectly normal to me. Ask Gov Jindal about his request to build berms to keep the oil out of the most sensitive areas. The idiot Feds told him to perform an Environmental Impact Statement on the berms. Now, a simple EIS takes about a year….. Jindal told them Eff U and started building the berms.

The real story here is the Feds were utterly incapable of doing anything about a problem they had responsibility for. Their approach was stern worlds for BP. Then sterner words for BP coupled with a look of displeasure. Presumably we would have moved from PG-14 to R Adult Content if things went on.

The Feds inability to deal with, aid, or even assess what was going on reminds me of the Saturday morning I went into the Pentagon to try to explain nuclear rocket engine design to a 3 star general fighter pilot. Or even worse than that; I have this image of Eggplant explaining re-entry vehicle design to a Labrador Retriever. In direct contrast to Katrina, it was the Feds area of responsibility and they were clueless, helpless, and gutless. Do you think the opposition to offshore drilling by the Democrats might have something to do with that? You don’t get competent in something you don’t expect to happen.

And the idea of cutting of the flow of oil from BP just before the Summer Driving Season? Great idea! Way to go!

Referring to a previous post, 13$ an hour is suck wages for a carpenter. My brother owned a carpenter business up until late ‘08. He started guys at 18 and his lead man was getting 25. And those were average for this area.

Two points to make here. First, our lead men get paid about $26, so there’s not a lot of difference for lead men. Second, the entry level job is stripping forms after the concrete cures. That is virtually unskilled labor, not what folks normally associate with carpentry.

The key is that a guy is paid according to his skills. Someone who starts at $13 can get to $26 in short order if he works hard, shows up regularly, is safe at all times, and learns. Education doesn’t have to take place in a classroom; we spend lots of money teaching people skills, so that they can progress up the wage scale by being more productive. They don’t progress because of seniority; they progress because of productivity.

The biggest challenges for that business right now are:

1. There is very little or no private commercial construction happening right now, so profits and wages are plummeting.
2. The work available is for government, and government work is a real pain.

Another couple of anecdotes from category 2:

We recently bid a project for a governmental entity. The engineer’s estimate was $31M. Our bid – the low bid – was $19.5M. We were asked to price up some changes – they amounted to about $3M. My thought at the time: this illustrates the fundamental problem with government work. As a contractor, I was happy to have the extra revenue. As a taxpayer, I was extremely irritated. Why spend that extra money? The project supposedly met the needs of the public as designed; why add scope to the project? Just give the money back to the taxpayers, and let them spend it.

We have a project with another one of our companies for another governmental entity. That entity has a representative on site who thinks he knows more about how to build a building that we do. But his main activity is going around telling people that their work is not good enough, forcing them to tear out the work and rebuild it. The workers, who got an order from someone in authority, simply did what they were told by this idiot. But when this was elevated to a superintendent, we looked at the “non-complying” work and found it was build exactly according to plans and specs. The idiot agreed, but said that wasn’t good enough for him, so we had to tear it out. We have run it up the line, and have yet to find anyone who will face down this bully. No one, I repeat no one, is better off because of this guy’s behavior. Our profits are lower, the workers are discouraged, the public pays more (because we will eventually get something for changes), and the product itself is no better (and might be worse, since rework is never quite as good as original work).

The fundamental problem is that government is a monopoly, and acts like a monopoly: corrupt, risk-averse, cowardly bullies. There are lots of good people in government, but the monopolistic incentive structure punishes them.

The design of our nation called for checks and balances to control the monopoly. But most if not all of the negative feedback loops have been severed by those who have accumulated power. As it is now, you’d need to be a hero to do the right thing within the monopoly.

And, human nature being what it is, there are simply not enough heroes to go around.

I have a friend who is president of his homeowners association in the Dallas, Texas suburbs. They were having a terrible problem with litter near some of his association’s homes. The reason according to Wallace (my friend) is that six very large, luxurious new houses are being built right next to their community.

The trash was coming from the foreign laborers working at the construction sites and included bags from McDonald’s, Burger King and 7-11, plus coffee cups, napkins, cigarette butts, soda cans, empty bottles, etc. He went to see the site supervisor and even the general contractor politely urging them to get their workers not to litter the neighborhood, to no avail. He called the city, county, and police and got no help there either.

So here is what his community did. They organized about twenty folks, named themselves The “Inner Neighborhood Services” group, and arranged to go out at lunchtime and “police” the trash themselves. It is what they did while picking up the trash that is so hilarious.

They bought navy blue baseball caps and had the initials”INS” embroidered in gold on the caps. It does not take a rocket scientist to understand what they hoped people might mistakenly think the letters really stand for. After the Inner Neighborhood Services group’s first lunch time pickup detail, with all of them wearing their caps and some carrying cameras, 46 out of the total of 68 construction workers did not show up for work the next morning — and haven’t come back yet. It has been ten days now.

The General Contractor, I am told is furious, but cannot say anything publicly because he could be busted for hiring illegals…

Wallace and his bunch cannot be accused of impersonating federal personnel, because they have the official name of the group recorded in their homeowner association minutes along with a notation about the vote to approve formation of the new subcommittee!

So, FOLKS, I THINK YOU COULD SAY THAT TEXAS INGENUITY TRIUMPHS AGAIN!

Gotta Love Those Texans!!!!!

RWE,

I do love those Texans!

I see similar things on job sites here in Florida and when I lived in AZ for 16 years. The Federal Govt is not allowed to enforce the existing immigration laws by the “President” and “Justice Dept”.

This morning in the local paper was an AP article about how the “Oprah” Obama Administration wants the Supreme Court to halt Arizona’s crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants because, “Federal Law trumps State Law”. What a LIE! There are Federal Laws on the books against the hiring of illegals!

Folks I stated in the past I have faith in our system and hope this charade begings to end this November. It is getting to the point I’m certain that “Oprah” Obama IS a leftist POS taking his cue from the Socialist Internationale.

Just as I believe there is a war within Islam between true Muslims and false “Muslim” criminals, I believe we are engaged in a Fourth Generation Civil War within the USA between Capitalists and Socialists.

If this civil war becomes a “shooting” war, 1861-1865 will pale in comparison. It will not be rural. It will be Urban. It will be Gang War. Thank The Most high I’m a country boy!

#98 MTRM,
I don’t think it will get as far as widespread shooting. I suspect the ballot will solve our problems. I hope it does. If the LLMD declares martial law after a terrorist attack, then a civil war is inevitable. If the elections are rigged again then the citizens have the right to raise up in arms. Since a large part of the Police AND Military agree with me, which the LLMD has to be aware of I expect the elections to go forth in a traditional manner. Some cheating but not the wholesale fraud of the ’08 election.
If we do wind up in a civil war, the major weapon of the right will be famine.
No city in America has enough food to deed it’s population for more then a few days. After a week of not eating I expect the Blue states to be a lot more willing to see reason. Know any truck drivers? Got a CB? Listen to what the long haul truckers think of LLMD. They make Whiskey seems like a reasonable, moderate fellow.
Those trucks stop running and the Urban dwellers stop eating.

RWE @ 96: We have a general problem, what happens when the feds are derelict in their duty? If Jindal builds his berms without permission and harms some rare birds, what do the feds do? The feds have failed to handle the leak or protect citizens – or birds. You see, it’s “OK” if BP kills the birds, not OK if the state or feds kill the birds. Same in Arizona (not to mention California, Texas, etc). What if the states pass a law that irritates citizens of Hispanic background, as a way of fixing a larger problem? We see that the feds hesitate to irritate citizens of Islamic backgrounds – yet, I suppose, to some degree they have made something like appropriate efforts nonetheless. What if the state of Arizona irritates the neighboring nation of Mexico, that likes having its citizens have free access to the US in spite of laws on the books?

The problem of a derelict central government is a problem indeed. It is a problem in Afghanistan right now. It was, I suppose, a problem in the failing Roman empire. I know of no precedent for it in American history, where states had serious interests that the feds neither addressed nor allowed the states to handle. I think some new precedents need to be set.

L3 @ 21 and 97: excellent real-world data and analysis. Keep on doing it. And while your highest and best use is not teaching economics, management and common sense civics to a classroom, you surely could do so with great effect. I love the way your post 21 exposes the cruel choice faced by people “earning” $8/hr from unemployment. The marginal return function has trapped them in an ugly little basin of dependency: just voluntary enough to corrode their sense of self-worth, because they know that they “could” (and “should”) take the job. But it takes real brass ones to climb out of that, accept the personal sacrifice (working harder to little more or sometimes less) and get back to running one’s own life.

Obama has referred to the effects of the BP oil leak in his recent visit to the Gulf as “an assault on our shores.”

Fair enough, but it sounds ridiculous and very revealing that the assault on our shores and borders by a much more problematic set of forces doesn’t warrant the same level of concern, but scorn for the likes of Arizona instead.

A few decades or so ago a friend of mine’s dad owned a construction and concrete supply company in Bozeman, MT. The decided to bid on a new Federal project. They submitted what they thought was a reasonable bid, were awarded the contract, and then…

Found out about the Davis Bacon Act, which requires that Union wages be paid on Federal projects even if the workers are not union. And since there were no construction unions in Bozeman to get union wages they had to go by those of the closest place that did, a much larger city that is 500 miles away.

Found out about OSHA requirements for the job, which required a safety inspector. And the only one available also had to come from 500 miles away. And there were a few other similar surprises in the project as well.

Needless to say, they did not come out too well on the job, and when the next bid was put out for a Federal project they chose not to bid. And no one else bid. So the Feds asked them why they did not bid and they explained why. Whereupon the Feds offered to help them write the bid to get around all those costly requirements.

Few people realize just how much expensive crap has been loaded onto Federal projects, both to satisfy the demands of special interest groups and the Feds own bureaucracy as well as the personality defects of the Federal officials involved.

Josh #102: What indeed can we do about a willfully incompetent Federal Government? Consider also the statement by the head of the INS that he is not going to accept the illegals collected by Arizona?

And please note that the “BP is in charge and we are dependent on them” approach is diametrically opposed to the approach taken by the Obama Admin in the areas, of housing, finance, auto production, and the states’s responsibilities for their own budgets. But it is EXACTLY the approach being taken by the Admin for manned space “exploration.”

Rev. Manning reminds me of a character created by a comedian named Doug Starks: the Reverend Brother Pastor Deacon Doctor Doug. His bits were a mainstay on the Tom Joyner morning radio program back in the 90′s, as I recall. The first time I saw one of Manning’s political sermons was back in 2008 and at first I though it was a comedy routine. Now I realize he takes himself pretty seriously, much more so than I do

But I agree with Manning that O was a dual citizen until age 21 and therefor is not a “natural born” citizen according to the constitutional requirement/definition. imho that dual citizenship is where he gets the shell game idea. This is fractionally worse than W. Bush whose mind shifted from one side of the Mexican border to the other depending on what language was going through his head. Small wonder the guy could barely speak.
…………..

According to the NY Times –except for some old Korean veterans — there is no interest in further escalation in the South.South Korea’s Collective Shrug

Most people now accept North Korea’s responsibility for the sinking that killed Mr. Mun and 45 other sailors. A small but sizable minority suspect an elaborate government conspiracy of some sort. What almost all seem to share is the desire that South Korea put this unfortunate business behind it as soon as possible.
………
So any further escalation would come from the North. Would they press their luck? Perhaps not if this is just a bloodletting to get the Nork military to go along with Kim’s Sucession–rather than say some dark PLA conspiracy.

Pick up his core, the “anti-White guy alliance” and have them turn out in masses. Remember, Eric Holder dismissed the New Black Panther Party convictions with the statement that Whites cannot by definition have their civil rights violated. Only non-Whites, by Whites.

Already, Harry Reid has drawn even with all his Republican challengers. Why? Latino (read: Mexican) voters are against the Arizona Law, Republican support for same, and bloc vote ethnically. Just like Blacks do.

Sestak has drawn ahead of Toomey. Why? Because Latino voters in PA have decided again to bloc vote against Republicans in favor of racial interests.

The problem with Wretchard’s analysis, or Glen Reynolds, or Rand Paul’s, or John Stossel’s, is two-point.

One, the assumption is that other races don’t bloc vote or if they do, Whites do not face discrimination or consequences.

Two, is that all abilities are distributed evenly among races, so if outcome disparities exist it must therefore be the result of … EVIL WHITE RACISM.

Per #1, that assumption is false. Mexicans are voting en-bloc to put more Mexicans into the US. Why? So they are the dominant voting force. Already Whites have gone from majority in 1980 in California to minority, with Mexicans the biggest group. Elites, and Libertarians, argue that only “loser White Trash” (no one would refer to “Mexican Trash” or “Black Trash”) lose out to being made minorities. That if you had value as a White person, you’d be rich and famous and powerful. For a while, this strategy worked. Its useless when the majority of the newly unemployed are White men who lost good paying jobs.

Bloc voting by ethnic/racial groups penalizes particularly ordinary White folks, unless they too bloc vote and single-mindedly pursue racial interests to the same degree as Mexicans and Blacks (the two biggest and therefore most politically important groups).

Secondly, abilities are not evenly and uniformly distributed among races, and given different evolutionary environments and isolation until recently, this is accepted as the case. My Irish-Scots ancestors came late to drink, compared to Eastern Mediterranean folks, and so have problems with alcohol. Whereas few Italians or Greeks are known as drunks. Amerindians came even later, and have notoriously big problems with booze.

No one cries disparate impact, when there are NO White corners or safeties in the NFL, and almost none in College football. No one says that statistically, a few seconds slower times on 40 yard dashes are just as good measures of employment, and so 66% of Wide Receivers should be White, to match the population. Meanwhile, much more important jobs, firefighers, are determined by racial quotas, with even Scalia and Thomas holding that disparate impact when it affects Blacks must have a racial-quota remedy. The Supremes decision was 9-0.

But not even the most casual fan would argue that to have more White players, NFL teams should sacrifice a few seconds of speed, in Wide Receivers, Safeties, or Corners. Because fans White, Black, and Mexican, all agree — Blacks are faster, and significantly faster, at the most elite level.

We understand sports sorts out races in “disparate impact” all the time, and no one gets upset about it. Shaun White and Usain Bolt are both world class Olympic Athletes. Which one is “better?” Neither. Different does not mean better.

Obama’s shell game is obvious. Rally his ethnic/racially based supporters, along with Gays, and perhaps feminists, to stem losses to minor ones. Polls suggest that this will be successful, as of now.

“Everything is hopelessly screwed up as you survey this scene. There’s no way to compete against Hon Hai other than perhaps building another one maybe the next poor country over. They’ll kill you on costs. There’s not much opportunity working for Hon Hai, and winding up owing your soul to the company store. The currency and financial arragements stand as impregnable barriers to really do much about it.

It’s a sick, unnatural system that brutalizes everyone, even the schmuks buying the over-priced iPads. These arrangements will totter and fail, and they will cause great and lasting pain on all sides before they do”

I back you on this

In normal times, our companies that delocate their production in such low cost labor force countries, would be labelled as betrayor to the patry

Josh @ 84, I have a suspicion about the formulation of the notions of comparative advantage as demonstrated by Ricardo. While I think there is some validity in his proposition, the weakness comes in comparing apples to turkey dressing.

If I understand it correctly (and I cannot give assurances that I do), Roberts improves the thinking. But the comparative advantages on new products and new services in global trade generates more flux in markets than comparative advantage notions account for. If the theory is adhered to South Korea would never have launched its automotive industry.

Like that theory the national security strategy is based upon a supporting structure of static assumptions that vary over time and are subject to more flux than the doc allows. Whiskey’s static use of race is based on definitions of sociological strata, that just ain’t so. It is individual initiative and individuals adjusting to situations and overcoming obstacles that starts the cultural trickle down/up flood like effect. Just as that is not a thing found in genetic code, consumption contains little predictive measure of culture. The leadership the NSS doc seeks, cannot be found in government, nor attained using their model.

The whole NSS effort reads more like the past bipartisan immigration reform bill put forth by Kennedy and McCain. The headings sound great, the substance is however not founded upon reality and is seriously flawed.

Leo, I’ve been banging nails for longer than I care to think about it.

I was out of work and my neighbor a supe for a commercial firm asked me to go to work for a interior trim sub who was having problems, at at 48$/hr union rate. I said yes. The work pace was ridiculously easy, slow, such that I told people that I got 96$/hr because the physical activity rate was half, or a third of what I was used to.

By and large my experience beyond speed was that if something could be done in a hour( that should be done in half) it took two or three hours.

For example, recessed lighting. There was a ceiling of sheetrock with half inch ply under that, and then a crawlspace with trusses and the rough boxes for the lights. I was charged with applying finished T and G. I asked for a finish benzel for the lights so that I would know what kind of margin for error I would have on my cuts at the rough light holes. Nope. So I put them in as close as a could, such that later I had to go back and route out the holes a bit. Mind you this was all done off staging.

It get’s worse. I was the last guy, the sheetrockers, the plywood installers all went through the same drill.

I asked why we couldn’t of just slabbed everything on there, with one crew. I could of done the ply, the rock the finish…..and then just marked out the hole locations and hole sawed the cuts though the finish T&G, the rock and the ply….and then sent the electrician up in the crawl to drop the rough boxes through the hole. I guess it would of labor cost 1/5.

Nope.

The whole project was like that. And it was a simple project. The engineers, the archeteck were dolts. My friends company was brought in to take over from the fired previous contractor, so he was just shaking his head trying to get out of there.

Another example, same project. I get tasked to interior trim the windows. Flat,painted casings. No problem, only my chop saw seems off. I check it, it’s on. I check the windows, they are off square. I told it’s going to be painted, make it work. We put the trim up. Later on the windows won’t open or close with out hammering them. They were installed out of square, and shingled to, and painted, such that the eventually they had to be relived of their shingles, un-nailed, de-interior trimmed.

The architect asked me what I thought of his design. I said it looked like a 1970′s Swedish bus terminal.

I waited, swept, organized all my tools for days waiting for a decision on interior pulls for cabinets. Not on plans. Being used to private world, I was a week or more ahead on reading plans to avoid such stuff. Here on the gov job, that only caused more problems.

So, in short, I went half or a third speed, did things twice or three times, and the quality was lower. The building could of been done at one third the costs.

A real education. Mostly I was told by everyone this is the way it always is, and just get through the day.

The initial problem usually begins with the inadequacy of and contradictions within the design documents. The architects and engineers get their work on a lump sum basis, so the less time they spend actually producing the plans and specifications the more they make. And, the design work is not usually awarded based on price but on how the government agency awarding the contract likes the presentation of the design firm. And, since the government employees making the decision are unlikely to be knowledgeable about what an architect or engineer actually does, their criteria for selection seldom have anything to do with relative competency of the competing firms. And, whiskey’s paradigm often applies with “affirmative action” firms getting the job, without regard to their prior experience or core competencies.

Then the bureaucrats at the awarding agency put together the bid package with hundreds of pages of boilerplate, much of it mutually contradictory or inapplicable to the actual project. But all of it is in the regulations somewhere, so, into the bid package it goes.

Then the potential bidders actually get to look at the bid documents and have a chance to ask questions and point out discrepancies and vagueries. These questions may or not be answered by one or more “addendas” to the bid documents and it the plans and specifications are truly FUBB, the bid date will be extended more than once.

Bid day comes, the bids are received and may or may not be publicly opened. If not publicly opened, no one knows how they did and the public agency sits on the information for as much as six months, while the bidders are obligated to hold their offers open. All the bidders have posted bonds in the amount of ten percent of their bids, which means that until they know how they did, they are limited in bidding other, possibly private, work.

Eventually, one bidder is selected and notified. Now the successful bidder has to come up with a huge amount of additional documentation on who their subcontractors and suppliers are and a job specific safety plan and a minority and women-owned and disabled veteran-owned business utilization plan and a recycling plan and a local hiring plan and after all these get scrutinized and critiqued and revised and re-critiqued by bureaucrats who have nothing else to do but to justify their existence, the contractor is allowed to start work. In retaliation, the contractor will have prepared many, perhaps hundreds of “RFI’s”,(Requests for Information), asking for clarifications of discrepancies in the plans and specifications and pointing out things that will be physically required to complete the job that are not incorporated into the design documents. These are addressed by the architects and engineers, who generally try cover their anatomies (CYA) by saying that anyone should have foreseen these issues and resolved them at their own expense. The contractor protests and this may or may not delay the job and usually results in the contractor receiving change orders giving them additional time and money for the “changed conditions”.

Once work actually starts, additional changed conditions are discovered, either things that the architect and engineers could not have been aware of, “concealed conditions”, or should have been aware of but blew off. More RFI’s and change orders to the agency.

There used to be a rule that the worse the plans and specifications, the less markup on the original bid, since the contractors would figure that they would make their profit through change orders as the contract documents were corrected over the duration of the job. So, that agencies got”smart” and severely limited the percentage of overhead and profit that contractors could charge on change orders, often to a point below actual cost, so now the worse the design documents the HIGHER the initial bids will be.

The agencies, like many consumers, believe that somewhere out there is a Magic Contractor. This is, that there is a contractor who is financially strong enough to bond the job (100% performance bonds are required), stupid enough to bid for less than the job will actually cost, but technically savvy enough to build the job and,again, financially strong enough to complete the job at a loss and walk away happy. Well, there may be Magic Contractors, but they don’t last long. But, like contractors who abuse their subcontractors and suppliers, the agencies believe in the Infinite Pool of Fools Theory, i.e. there are an infinite pool of fools who will take work for less than it costs to perform. Sadly, this is often correct in the short run.

Inspectors? Some are pretty good, but there are also those like a contractor I know encountered on a project for the Golden Gate Bridge Authority, who would actually damage the work in place and require the contractor to remove and replace it. Since the contractor had subcontracted the work, it was no skin off his nose and he just passed the responsibility on the the subcontractor. Subcontractor could have protested, but he would have to go through the general contractor to get to the agency, and this would have delayed the job, which had a thousand dollar a day penalty for delayed completion, the subcontractor just shut up and made the repairs.

Similar situations occur all the time with the inspector requiring work which is beyond the scope of contract documents. If the general contractor is scrupulous, this will be challenged and a change order written, but the general contractor may be trying to curry favor with the agency and the inspector, so again the subcontractor may simply be hung out to dry.

In fairness to the agencies and their inspectors, there are incompetent contractors and subcontractors. However, unlike incompetent contract administrators and inspectors, they go broke and leave the industry.

Yup, that’s why government work costs a damn sight more than private work. But, not to worry, a lot of social goals are met along the way and it’s not like it was anyone’s money.